Usual disclaimers apply.
"And, oh, I just want it to be something Lissa will remember forever," Tatiana gushed, oblivious to the time. My shift had ended – the night guardians had taken over – and I was trying to get out of the Court. My plans, however, were in vain, because it seemed that the queen had plans to keep me here (and away from Dimitri) for as long as possible.
"Ma'am, I know you want it to be great-"
"Not great, Rosemarie, perfect," Tatiana said, cutting me off. It was something she did regularly.
"Perfect, then. But ma'am, I really-"
"Don't you think this vase would look perfect at the party?" Tatiana asked me, handing me a vase she picked up off the end table we stopped by.
"Yes, but-"
"It can be moved, replaced, whatever the staff does around here."
"Ma'am, my shift is over and I don't think-"
"I don't care what you think right now. How about a purple color scheme for the party?"
Filthy, bloody hypocrite, I thought miserably.
"Um, I think it'd be fine. Last I checked, though, I think that's the color scheme Lissa's using for her wedding."
"Oh, well that won't do, now will it?" Tatiana stood there, eyeing me. I looked down at my usual guardian outfit (black, crisp pants, white button-down shirt, black trench coat for hiding weapons, sensible black shoes) and then back up at her. I was still amazed that she let me say two full sentences without Lissa in the room.
"No ma'am," I said, agitated that she wouldn't let me go.
"Lissa?" She asked, eyeing my head. I instinctively reached up to the French braid Lissa had put in that morning.
I nodded. "She forced me into the chair."
"That sounds like Lissa." Tatiana let out a humorless, hollow chuckle. "I assume other guardians were keeping watch at the time, then?"
"Edison Castile was keeping watch, as well as Jeremy Acros and Sofya Levitsky, Lissa and Christian's secondary guardians. Of course, I wasn't completely oblivious to what else was going on in the room." I hated giving reports like that. It was against the rules to say anything but the person's full name, and I could barely remember last names. To show you didn't remember something important was a sign of weakness and inattention, which meant pay dock. I was already having a hard time enough making meet's end and the last thing I needed was to have a pay dock.
"Good. Acros and Levitsky have been guardians for a long time and St. Vladimir's did a good job of placing you and Castile. Actually, and this goes off the record, had Lissa and Ozera not come along, Acros and Levitsky would probably have been reassigned to regular Moroi," Tatiana said, spitting out the last two words like they were venom. We had started walking again, the queen's guardians following us.
"I guess that's a good thing," I said, trailing off at the end, in disagreement with the queen's views.
"Yes, yes it is. Rosemarie, I need to confide something in you. Can I trust you to keep quiet until the time is right?" Tatiana asked, a mask of fright sitting on her face. It was in that moment when I looked at her that she suddenly looked like the old woman she really was. Stress with the increasing number of Strigoi attacks had aged her quite a bit.
"Yes," I said, avoiding the cliché, "How will I know when the time is right?" If the queen knew I would know when the time is right, I would know. Even though Tatiana didn't like me or the men I happened to associate with or most of my views (which were the same as Lissa's and the queen was fine with them), through her favoring Lissa, we had to deal with each other a lot. Sadly, I knew the queen almost as well as I knew Lissa.
The queen studied me again, this time longer than any other time before. (I had noticed her watching me when I was with Lissa.) After a couple minutes, she sat down on a nearby chair and continued to study me. It was quite annoying, and I really wanted to leave so I could get home, but I stood there, guardian mode turned full on, but staring the queen straight in the eyes, always checking my peripherals.
"I know she's in a separate family line, but when I pass away, I'm leaving the throne to Lissa. Adrian's my only heir; all of my other family has passed, whether Strigoi attack or illness or car accidents or old age or what have you. I can't leave the throne to Adrian because he's male and the Moroi world is a matriarch leadership, and besides, I wouldn't feel comfortable leaving it to him.
"Most of the other princesses around here only care about looks and who they're connected to and which Moroi man has captured their heart. Lissa has ideas and ambition and if you haven't noticed, I haven't placed her in a job anywhere. At your graduation, if you recall, I promised her a job in the Court. She has potential, and I don't want that to go to waste in some any old job around here."
I stood there, stunned, my tiny apartment I called home forgotten about.
"You want Lissa to be queen?" I choked out, still in disbelief.
The queen nodded slowly. "I can trust that you'll tell Lissa when it's the best time to tell her?"
"Of course," I said, my head reeling.
"And I need you to keep this quiet from anybody else; can I trust you with this?"
"Yes," I said, knowing she'd find out if I told anyone.
"Thank you, Rosemarie. You can go." Tatiana waved a hand in the direction of the end of the hallway.
I took off at a fast walk down the hallway. When I got to the door, Tatiana called out, "Keep being good to Lissa."
"I will," I called back, but I doubted that she heard me.
When the door shut behind me, I took off at a run through the main Court building (the same one Victor Dashkov's trial was held in) to the guardian workroom. We had a lounge of sorts to dump our personal items, like coats and bags, while we were on duty.
After checking my locker and the locker opposite mine across the bench, I ran out of the workroom, slipped through the door guardians had to get from the streets to the workroom, and then throwing my coat on and juggling my bag at the same time, let my legs fly as I sprinted from the building to my tiny apartment in the apartment complex half-day guardians, like myself, lived in. The queen had the complex built because half-day guardians didn't make as much money as full-day guardians and therefore were far from being able to afford a regular house.
My sprints didn't break as I pounded up the stairs four at a time, practically leaping at this point, up to the seventh floor. Guardians came at all times of the day, so nobody stuck their heads out of their doors and yelled at me to keep the noise down. People only did that if you had a loud party at one in the morning with deafening techno music from the '80s.
I unlocked the door and picked up the newspaper (our newspaper was a combination of Moroi news and human news) that had been dropped at the door this morning. The door shut softly behind me as I scanned the headlines. Nothing about me or anybody I knew except for a little blurb about Christian's recent trip to England to meet with the UK Strigoi Count Official.
Satisfied, I threw the paper and my bag onto the couch, a whole two feet away from the door. I took my coat off and, ignoring the snow the floated to the cheap carpet, made my way into the kitchen/dining room since they were combined into one room.
"Out," I read from the note sitting on the counter. "Very descriptive," I muttered and turned on the TV (literally the gorilla in the corner; the thing was a gift from Lissa and Christian last year and was huge), flipping to Hollywood Access, my secret guilty pleasure only Dimitri knew about. I absent-mindedly listened to Ryan Seacrest taking phone calls from people about their views on Brad Pitt's death in the car crash that happened a week ago as I threw together macaroni and cheese for the millionth night in a row.
The living room was the length of the wall that hid the dishwasher, sink, counter space, and three rather small cabinets from those in the living room. It was about as wide as the couch. The TV barely fit; the space between the wall concealing the side of the sink and dishwasher and the wall that the TV hung on was as wide as me, which was how I could see the TV. The refrigerator, stove/oven, and two tiny spaces of counter were opposite the sink, with a little walkway in between so somebody (and really only one person) could walk through the kitchen. There was barely enough room to get from the front door to the living room without me clipping the wall that hid the kitchen.
Lissa hated the color they painted the walls (an off-white), declaring it unsuitable for a home to look that color. With permission from Dimitri and me, she had an entire interior design team come in and take it from a bare apartment to an apartment with a Tuscan feel.
Why Tuscan was beyond me, and I could barely remember agreeing to it, but the walls were a dark (yet somehow light) brown that made the place feel tiny but huge at the same time. The coffee table was apparently imported from this tiny little place in Tuscany (how convenient) and there were paintings of Italy that were big enough so that old people could see them clearly but small enough so that they didn't feel overbearing.
The couch was made of leather and while the climate was warmer here in Philadelphia, it wasn't hot enough that I avoided sitting on the couch during the summer. It was also one of those couches that unfolded into a bed. Lissa made sure of it since my mother visited occasionally and when Lissa felt nice enough to lend Dimitri and I some money to fly in his mother or one of his sisters every once in a while.
The doors were painted the same shade of brown (as was the rest of the apartment), and there were two on the door space between the kitchen and the front door. The one on the right was a tiny, narrow bathroom with the same Tuscan theme, shower curtain and all.
The one on the left was the bedroom Dimitri and I shared (the apartment complex was designed so that only one person lived in each apartment; it was rare for a couple to live permanently together), and it wrapped behind the kitchen. There was barely enough room to put in a queen-sized bed, two night stands, a wardrobe, and a stand-up closet Lissa ordered from IKEA, some home furnishing store I was supposed to know about. Lissa had grumbled about the closet since, according to her, there was supposed to be a closet already built in.
The bedroom was the relief of the Tuscan theme. While I don't remember why we went with a Tuscan theme, I do remember my having an argument with Lissa about the bedroom. Lissa insisted that we needed to keep the theme consistent; I pointed out that only Dimitri and I would be seeing the bedroom, so it wasn't like the theme needed to find its way there. In the end, after much grumbling and reluctance, Lissa let us design the bedroom, going with a much simpler black and white theme.
I ate in the living room and watched as Ryan kept taking more calls, mostly from women my age and movie producers who had worked with him. I was amazed at how possessive humans were over a person they had either never met or worked with for only a short time. Granted, my thoughts were a bit hypocritical being half human myself, but it was still funny and interesting to watch.
Hollywood Access changed into some new show I didn't really care about watching, so I channel-surfed for a little while and ended up coming across the repeat of Jon Stewart from the night before on Comedy Central. I turned it down to keep as background noise while I read through the newspaper. Mostly it was about the queen and her declining health and what would happen if she were to die, something I found as kind of ironic considering the conversation the queen and I had earlier. The editorial was about who the editor thought would take over the throne should Tatiana die. Lissa wasn't mentioned anywhere.
The human newspaper was focused on the candidates for next year's presidential election and some new reform the president was all excited about, along with most of America. The weather forecast called for more snow for the next week, which would no doubt make Dimitri happy, since the last two winters had been filled with little snow and the occasional downpour that turned into ice overnight.
Eventually Jon Stewart changed into The Colbert Report, and I turned the TV back up so I would know what Eddie was talking about today. Normally I was too tired to make it to 11:30, which was when the original broadcasting of The Colbert Report happened, and therefore Eddie's recapping was all one-sided with me since I had no idea what had happened the night before.
Stephen Colbert had slowly been turning into my favorite comedian. It was helpful on my stress levels to laugh every day, even if it was only for a half hour and the occasional sarcastic quip from Eddie or Fya (my nickname for Sofya) throughout the day.
8:30 turned into 9:00, and the TV went back down. The forgotten macaroni-and-cheese bowl and fork was taken care of, and I went about doing just general tidying up of the apartment. It was a weird night of ease and feeling comfortable; normally Dimitri would be home and he'd be musing over his laptop and more often than not, nursing some vodka-infused drink he made that night. The two cabinets next to the dishwasher rivaled the stock of liquor a nightclub had.
Trying to keep the feeling alive, I changed into a pair of old sweats from [the college Lissa and I went to] and a ratty tank top that survived from my high school years, turning the heat up a little when I went back out into the living room. Dimitri still wasn't home, but I tried not to think about it too much. At 11, when that night's Jon Stewart came back on, I brushed my teeth and threw my hair up into a haphazard, makeshift bun. Surprised by my ability to stay up this late, I went ahead and watched that night's The Colbert Report, too, excited to actually be able to put in my two cents with Eddie tomorrow.
When the show was over, I gave up trying to wait for Dimitri, and shut the TV off and turned the lights off in the living room, plunging the apartment into darkness. I felt my way into the bedroom, and turned the light on, quickly switching the lights so that my bedside lamp was on. I pulled the bun out, letting my hair, now wavy from the loose French braid Tatiana had commented on, drop around my shoulders and down my back. It was a little shorter with the waves, so it didn't fully make it to its usual halfway-down-my-back spot.
I got into bed, the 500-count thread sheets warmed from the heat I had turned off – a little thing Dimitri and I did to save money. With one last look at Dimitri's side of the bed, crumpled sheets pulled up to the pillows to try and convince me that the bed was actually made that morning, I shut the light off, once again plunging the apartment into complete darkness (save the street lamp outside), and fell asleep.
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